Recently, it has been possible to manage assets information about equipment such as computers connected to a network held by a company or the like. For example, by utilizing SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol), it is possible to automatically collect MAC addresses and IP addresses to examine a part of a network equipment configuration. It is also possible to collect information about equipment connected to a network with the use of a technique such as an agent technique and utilize the information for system recovery in the case of system failure.
According to Japanese Published Unexamined Patent Application No. 9-93265, multiple distributed managers are provided in a communication network; information about nodes is collected from so-called SNMP agents belonging to the respective distributed managers to create topology information; higher distributed managers collect the topology information to create topology information about partial networks; still higher distributed managers collect the topology information about the partial networks to create topology information about partial networks; and this is repeated until topology information about the entire network is finally created.
According to Japanese Published Unexamined Patent Application No. 10-161956, a network management system holds predetermined configuration information which includes management system identification information for identifying the network management system, component identification information for identifying network components and time information indicating times when the network management system and the network components are connected and which indicates system configuration, and thereby the network management system can easily activate a system in accordance with a predetermined activation procedure based on configuration information collected from the network components and the configuration information it holds. Furthermore, the network management system compares the configuration information collected from the network components with the configuration information it holds, and if management system identification information of both of the configuration information corresponds to each other, and time information of both of the configuration information corresponds to each other, but component identification information of both of the configuration information does not correspond to each other, then the network management system gives new component identification information to the network components to continue the operation. Thereby, activation or maintenance operation for initial setting in the case of failure is facilitated.
According to the above-described conventional techniques, assets management of equipment constituting a network is facilitated, and it is possible to cope with recovery in the case of failure in a network to some extent.
However, if a failure occurs in a network and the cause of the failure is not known, it is necessary to perform failure analysis and system diagnosis. In this case, for which part an analysis tool should be executed is basically determined based on a system administrator's experience and intuition, and therefore, it is troublesome to cope with the failure. Especially in a large-scaled network or a network including an web environment, if a failure occurs, a great amount of time and labor is required for grasping relative performance time among network component devices, identifying a bottleneck position and analyzing the problem. Even if any of the technique of the above-identifies references is used, it still depends on the system administrator's intuition and experience, that is, his personal abilities to grasp performance time and identify a bottleneck position. In such a situation where it is difficult to grasp performance time and a bottleneck, it is inevitable to again depend on the system administrator's personal abilities even in system designing for renewal of the system or partial change in the network. It is expected that this will be very difficult work in most cases. Furthermore, in the case of replacement of the system administrator, problem analysis, system designing, system change and the like required when a network failure occurs will be very difficult for a new network administrator.
In the case of a network component device without SNMP functions, such as a hub, information about the network component device cannot be automatically acquired, and therefore, the network device will drop from the network topology and the actual connection form cannot be accurately grasped, unless the network device is manually added to the network topology. Furthermore, it is not desirable to manage a network based on the SNMP functions, because, in this case, a great amount of load is imposed on the network when data is collected from network component devices, and functional deterioration of the whole network is caused even if only a part of the network is abnormal.